‘Business as usual is a business of death’: UN adopts road safety pledge over US objection

This article is published in association with United Nations.

The UN General Assembly closed its first ever High-level Meeting on road safety on Tuesday by adopting a sweeping new declaration aimed at halving road deaths by 2030 – over the sole objection of the United States.

The Progress Declaration passed by a recorded vote of 162 in favour to one against, with no abstentions. 

It commits governments to strengthen national road safety systems, upgrade vehicle and infrastructure standards, and adopt the ‘Safe System’ approach, which designs roads and vehicles to survive the mistakes drivers inevitably make.

Washington cries mission creep

The US representative accused the declaration of “mandate creep that has eroded the credibility of this institution,” objecting to provisions linking road safety with climate and environmental policy.

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“Road safety is a practical matter of engineering, sober driving and personal responsibility,” he said. It “should not be used as a backdoor vehicle to enforce global climate pacts and top-down environmental restrictions on freedom of mobility.”

Other countries backed the declaration while marking their own reservations. 

Argentina stressed its sovereign right to implement it according to national law, while separately reserving its position on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) role. Paraguay underlined that the follow-up process, like the declaration itself, is voluntary and non-binding.

‘More than the number killed in direct conflict’

Opening the meeting, General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock addressed the question she said many people ask: why does the UN spend its time on road safety when wars and crises dominate the agenda?

The answer, she said, is scale. Road crashes kill more than 1.2 million people a year and injure some 50 million more – more, she noted, than are killed in direct conflict, murdered, or die of malaria.

“Since I began speaking,” she told delegates, several more families had already received news that would change their lives forever.

She asked delegates to think of the everyday journeys that bring people to work, school or home – “whether you came by car, by bike or simply walked” to UN Headquarters, all had taken part in “the complex choreography of New York’s traffic system.”

The issue is personal for her too: her aunt was killed by a tram, a loss whose legacy, she said, “lingered”, sending “never-ending ripples of devastation” through the family.

Progress, but nowhere near fast enough

New WHO data released alongside the declaration show the global road death rate fell 21 per cent between 2011 and 2025, even as more than a billion vehicles were added to the world’s roads. 

Still, 1.16 million people died in crashes in 2025, and road injuries remain the leading killer of children and young people aged 5 to 29.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus opened his remarks by asking delegates who had been in a crash or had lost or known someone killed or injured in one, to stand. “I think almost all of us,” he said. “All road deaths are preventable and none are acceptable.”

The gains are wildly uneven. Deaths fell 36 per cent in Europe and 15 per cent in the Western Pacific, but just two per cent in South-East Asia; they were flat in the Americas and up 17 per cent in Africa. 

Motorcyclists, whose numbers have more than tripled since 2011, now account for nearly a third of all road deaths – though WHO says a certified helmet cuts the risk of dying more than sixfold.

As the UN’s Special Envoy for Road Safety, Jean Todt, put it: “Business as usual is a business of death.”